SPELLING BEE

TimeBY

BEA WESTERBERG

The adventure of this week was trying to find out why the water bed was not warm and toasty. What??? Yes I did say water bed. I bet a lot of your forgot or did did not even know such things were on this planet. It works very well for our upstairs farmhouse that does not have heat registers. I keep a lot of blankets on it so I was surprised that one night it just did not seem warm enough. At first I thought it was just me that got chilled and could not warm up but more jammies and more blankets did not help. Pumpkin the cat sleeps with me and I made good use of him that night. I did not sleep real good and in the morning I checked to be see if it was plugged in. The wall part was okay but when I got myself down on the floor with the flashlight, I saw a unplugged thing coming out of the bed. Ah, that was the cord that plugged into the attachment on the bed that had the cord coming to it from the outlite. This all worked together to send heat to the part that was placed under the water container! It took a few days but I am back to warm bed time. Pumpkin the cat likes to play behind the bed so he is getting the blame for unplugging.

Christmas is getting closer and closer and is almost here! Shopping for Christmas has gotten so different in the past several years that I am sure many new ways and traditions have taken place. Internet shopping has expanded into a whole new world of getting things without seeing and touching the actual product. The big plus to that is you can do that in your jammies and for sure do not need to find a parking space. You do not have to fight the crowds and have to do knock down battles to get the last toy on the shelf. The down side to this magic way is that not so Christmas spirited people are going around and do their own shopping by stealing the packages from your doorstep. I do see that you can have the major shippers take your items to a central pickup place so your treasures are not available for unwanted pickup by the bad people.

CHARLIE BROWN did not bring himself up from the basement after his year long rest so I had to personally take care of that issue. I did find a little space in the living room to park him and get some lights and bears in place to call it a decorated Christmas tree. It is sharing the area with stacks of Larry’s books that I am trying to sort out and find new homes for. There is a very wide range from how to tie hundreds of knots to land survey with lots of gun, wood working, hunting and forestry things in between.

My cookie hormones did not come to full power but I did get some things made and of course had to have tastings of all. Did you hear of the big cream cheese shortage that was probably going to shut down some of the bagel shops on the east coast? I heard that if you got into the right kind of deal, the major maker of cream cheese would pay you not to buy it this year? I did not even try to check out the details of that move since I had a few packages on hand. I called up the tired and true way to do non-bake cookies with Ritz crackers and something to melt to cover it all up. Peanut butter between 2 Ritz crackers and then dipped in melted chocolate is what I did for years. I then moved on to Nutella for the filling and that was good. Last year I did a lot of them using the Solo fillings of poppy seed, almond and apricot. This was handy as it was the leftovers from the Polish cookie making project. This year I had gotten a fig spread that worked really well with the honey wheat whole grain Ritz crackers and dark chocolate covering. Now that is good eating! Maybe have a few extra on hand for the after Christmas time when the tax preparers send out the notice that you should be getting your 2021 taxes together.

For the present have a great, loving holiday with family and friends. Be thankful for sunrise and sunset of each day. HUGS!